“Catwoman, Volume 1: The Game”

“What is Catwoman’s deal? Seriously.

She goes back and forth, living the fast life with stolen diamonds or whatever, but then always feels regretful when one of her dopey sideline friends gets caught up and usually murdered in a fairy non-graphic fashion.

I mean, what’s the deal here?

I’m cool with a reckless lady stealing weird jewels and living it up on the run. And I’m cool with a story about a lady trying to get things right. But honestly, I’m fairly bored and frustrated by a story about a lady who wants it both ways. For example, I feel pretty ambivalent when Catwoman does some righteous street justice stuff on a dude who killed one of her friends back in the day because I’ve just watched her also do a bunch of bad stuff. So sometimes she’s doing Catwoman stuff to steal, sometimes to do justice-y stuff? And how does that get decided? And when a cop rolls his car chasing her from a crime scene and dies, what then? And how come she makes the “that’s it, from now on I work alone” declaration only to go back on it two issues later?

You know what Catwoman is like? Did you ever know a person who was in college and was always changing his/her major every three months? And could never decide on anything because ultimately he/she was very unhappy but couldn’t connect that, without any sort of commitment to anything, the happiness would never come? And you always had to hear the deep thoughts of this person, but in the back of your mind it was always grating because the person seemed completely unable to apply any of the thinking to him/her self? And one week it was short blue hair and the next week it was something with bicycles and then right after that it was thick-framed glasses and then weird piercings? Always something that the person thought was an expression of personality when it was really being used to stand-in for personality? THAT’S what Catwoman is like, and it’s annoying because I don’t really want to read about a woman in her 30’s with superpowers who doesn’t really know who she is. The only difference between her and a total loser is that she runs around on rooftops instead of rewatching the Wings box set over and over.

Also, the whole Catwoman/Batman love affair makes no sense to me whatsoever. I just don’t understand why this dude, who has a bizarrely strict crime-fighting code of sorts, can’t seem to apprehend Catwoman. Or at least convince her that maybe Gotham City, home of the world’s greatest detective, isn’t the best place for robbing safes. “